I long to hear that you have declared an independancy [sic]--and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be nec...essary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Laidies [sic] we are determined to foment a Rebelion [sic], and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I feel more charity for a Mormon who has been taught from his birth that it is not only his right but his duty to God to enter int...o plural marriages, and that the man who has the greatest number of wives stands highest in God's favor, than I do for the man who has been taught from his cradle that the unpardonable sin is the desecration of womanhood; whose religious training and the moral code of civilization in which he is reared make it a crime to violate the Seventh Commandment and the established law of monogamy. Yet, judging from the testimony we see all about us--our ... lying-in and foundling hospitals and our fallen womanhood--the married or single man who lives a pure life is rare.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a cla...ssification, and that all classifications are oppressive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The field maneuvers may be different from those in Holmes's day, and the villain is more socially mobile, but since Sir Arthur we ...have not changed the three essential ingredients of the private eye. He must be a bachelor, with the bachelor's harum-scarum availability at all hours (William Powell's marriage to Myrna "Nora" Loy, a wistful concession to the family trade, fooled nobody). He must have an inconspicuous fund of curious knowledge, which in the end is always crucially relevant. He must pity the official guardians of the law. Of course, the twentieth century has grafted some interesting personality changes on the original. Holmes was an eccentric in the Victorian sense, a man with queer hobbies--cocaine was lamentable but pardonably melodramatic--whose social code was essentially that of the ruling classes. He was, in a way, the avenging squire of the underworld ready to administer a horsewhipping to the outcasts who were never privileged by birth to receive it from their fathers. Bogart is a displaced person whose present respectability is uncertain, a classless but well-contained vagabond who is not going to be questioned about where he came from or where he is going. ("I came to Casablanca for the waters." "But there are no waters in Casablanca." "I was misinformed.")LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I care not for the theoretical symmetry and impregnable logic of your moral code, I care not for the hoary respectability and trad...itional mysticisms of your theological institutions, I care not for the beauty and solemnity of your rituals and religious ceremonies, I care not even for the reasonableness and unimpeachable fairness of your social ethics,--if it does not turn out better, nobler, truer, men and women,--if it does not add to the world's stock of valuable souls,--if it does not give us a sounder, healthier, more reliable product from this great factory of men--I will have none of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Slavery is no more sinful, by the Christian code, than it is sinful to wear a whole coat, while another is in tatters, to eat a be...tter meal than a neighbor, or otherwise to enjoy ease and plenty, while our fellow creatures are suffering and in want.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

When I was quite young I fondly imagined that all foreign languages were codes for English. I thought that "hat," say, was the rea...l and actual name of the thing, but that people in other countries, who obstinately persisted in speaking the code of their forefathers, might use the word "ibu," say, to designate not merely the concept hat, but the English word "hat." I knew only one foreign word, "oui," and since it had three letters as did the word for which it was a code, it seemed, touchingly enough, to confirm my theory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws ma...y be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »